Foundation models have reshaped the landscape of Remote Sensing (RS) by enhancing various image interpretation tasks. Pretraining is an active research topic, encompassing supervised and self-supervised learning methods to initialize model weights effectively. However, transferring the pretrained models to downstream tasks may encounter task discrepancy due to their formulation of pretraining as image classification or object discrimination tasks. In this study, we explore the Multi-Task Pretraining (MTP) paradigm for RS foundation models to address this issue. Using a shared encoder and task-specific decoder architecture, we conduct multi-task supervised pretraining on the SAMRS dataset, encompassing semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and rotated object detection. MTP supports both convolutional neural networks and vision transformer foundation models with over 300 million parameters. The pretrained models are finetuned on various RS downstream tasks, such as scene classification, horizontal and rotated object detection, semantic segmentation, and change detection. Extensive experiments across 14 datasets demonstrate the superiority of our models over existing ones of similar size and their competitive performance compared to larger state-of-the-art models, thus validating the effectiveness of MTP.
Integrating LiDAR and camera information into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representation has emerged as a crucial aspect of 3D object detection in autonomous driving. However, existing methods are susceptible to the inaccurate calibration relationship between LiDAR and the camera sensor. Such inaccuracies result in errors in depth estimation for the camera branch, ultimately causing misalignment between LiDAR and camera BEV features. In this work, we propose a robust fusion framework called Graph BEV. Addressing errors caused by inaccurate point cloud projection, we introduce a Local Align module that employs neighbor-aware depth features via Graph matching. Additionally, we propose a Global Align module to rectify the misalignment between LiDAR and camera BEV features. Our Graph BEV framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an mAP of 70.1\%, surpassing BEV Fusion by 1.6\% on the nuscenes validation set. Importantly, our Graph BEV outperforms BEV Fusion by 8.3\% under conditions with misalignment noise.
In this paper, we propose to tackle Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) from a new perspective, i.e., relation disentanglement, which means enhancing FSCIL via disentangling spurious relation between categories. The challenge of disentangling spurious correlations lies in the poor controllability of FSCIL. On one hand, an FSCIL model is required to be trained in an incremental manner and thus it is very hard to directly control relationships between categories of different sessions. On the other hand, training samples per novel category are only in the few-shot setting, which increases the difficulty of alleviating spurious relation issues as well. To overcome this challenge, in this paper, we propose a new simple-yet-effective method, called ConTrollable Relation-disentangLed Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (CTRL-FSCIL). Specifically, during the base session, we propose to anchor base category embeddings in feature space and construct disentanglement proxies to bridge gaps between the learning for category representations in different sessions, thereby making category relation controllable. During incremental learning, the parameters of the backbone network are frozen in order to relieve the negative impact of data scarcity. Moreover, a disentanglement loss is designed to effectively guide a relation disentanglement controller to disentangle spurious correlations between the embeddings encoded by the backbone. In this way, the spurious correlation issue in FSCIL can be suppressed. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-100, mini-ImageNet, and CUB-200 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our CTRL-FSCIL method.
Link prediction typically studies the probability of future interconnection among nodes with the observation in a single social network. More often than not, real scenario is presented as a multiplex network with common (anchor) users active in multiple social networks. In the literature, most existing works study either the intra-link prediction in a single network or inter-link prediction among networks (a.k.a. network alignment), and consider two learning tasks are independent from each other, which is still away from the fact. On the representation space, the vast majority of existing methods are built upon the traditional Euclidean space, unaware of the inherent geometry of social networks. The third issue is on the scarce anchor users. Annotating anchor users is laborious and expensive, and thus it is impractical to work with quantities of anchor users. Herein, in light of the issues above, we propose to study a challenging yet practical problem of Geometry-aware Collective Link Prediction across Multiplex Network. To address this problem, we present a novel contrastive model, RCoCo, which collaborates intra- and inter-network behaviors in Riemannian spaces. In RCoCo, we design a curvature-aware graph attention network ($\kappa-$GAT), conducting attention mechanism in Riemannian manifold whose curvature is estimated by the Ricci curvatures over the network. Thereafter, we formulate intra- and inter-contrastive loss in the manifolds, in which we augment graphs by exploring the high-order structure of community and information transfer on anchor users. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments with 14 strong baselines on 8 real-world datasets, and show the effectiveness of RCoCo.
A reliable long-term time-series forecaster is highly demanded in practice but comes across many challenges such as low computational and memory footprints as well as robustness against dynamic learning environments. This paper proposes Meta-Transformer Networks (MANTRA) to deal with the dynamic long-term time-series forecasting tasks. MANTRA relies on the concept of fast and slow learners where a collection of fast learners learns different aspects of data distributions while adapting quickly to changes. A slow learner tailors suitable representations to fast learners. Fast adaptations to dynamic environments are achieved using the universal representation transformer layers producing task-adapted representations with a small number of parameters. Our experiments using four datasets with different prediction lengths demonstrate the advantage of our approach with at least $3\%$ improvements over the baseline algorithms for both multivariate and univariate settings. Source codes of MANTRA are publicly available in \url{https://github.com/anwarmaxsum/MANTRA}.
In the realm of modern autonomous driving, the perception system is indispensable for accurately assessing the state of the surrounding environment, thereby enabling informed prediction and planning. Key to this system is 3D object detection methods, that utilize vehicle-mounted sensors such as LiDAR and cameras to identify the size, category, and location of nearby objects. Despite the surge in 3D object detection methods aimed at enhancing detection precision and efficiency, there is a gap in the literature that systematically examines their resilience against environmental variations, noise, and weather changes. This study emphasizes the importance of robustness, alongside accuracy and latency, in evaluating perception systems under practical scenarios. Our work presents an extensive survey of camera-based, LiDAR-based, and multimodal 3D object detection algorithms, thoroughly evaluating their trade-off between accuracy, latency, and robustness, particularly on datasets like KITTI-C and nuScenes-C to ensure fair comparisons. Among these,multimodal 3D detection approaches exhibit superior robustness and a novel taxonomy is introduced to reorganize its literature for enhanced clarity. This survey aims to offer a more practical perspective on the current capabilities and constraints of 3D object detection algorithms in real-world applications, thus steering future research towards robustness-centric advancements
Multi-modal 3D object detectors are dedicated to exploring secure and reliable perception systems for autonomous driving (AD). However, while achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on clean benchmark datasets, they tend to overlook the complexity and harsh conditions of real-world environments. Meanwhile, with the emergence of visual foundation models (VFMs), opportunities and challenges are presented for improving the robustness and generalization of multi-modal 3D object detection in autonomous driving. Therefore, we propose RoboFusion, a robust framework that leverages VFMs like SAM to tackle out-of-distribution (OOD) noise scenarios. We first adapt the original SAM for autonomous driving scenarios named SAM-AD. To align SAM or SAM-AD with multi-modal methods, we then introduce AD-FPN for upsampling the image features extracted by SAM. We employ wavelet decomposition to denoise the depth-guided images for further noise reduction and weather interference. Lastly, we employ self-attention mechanisms to adaptively reweight the fused features, enhancing informative features while suppressing excess noise. In summary, our RoboFusion gradually reduces noise by leveraging the generalization and robustness of VFMs, thereby enhancing the resilience of multi-modal 3D object detection. Consequently, our RoboFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance in noisy scenarios, as demonstrated by the KITTI-C and nuScenes-C benchmarks.
LiDAR-camera fusion can enhance the performance of 3D object detection by utilizing complementary information between depth-aware LiDAR points and semantically rich images. Existing voxel-based methods face significant challenges when fusing sparse voxel features with dense image features in a one-to-one manner, resulting in the loss of the advantages of images, including semantic and continuity information, leading to sub-optimal detection performance, especially at long distances. In this paper, we present VoxelNextFusion, a multi-modal 3D object detection framework specifically designed for voxel-based methods, which effectively bridges the gap between sparse point clouds and dense images. In particular, we propose a voxel-based image pipeline that involves projecting point clouds onto images to obtain both pixel- and patch-level features. These features are then fused using a self-attention to obtain a combined representation. Moreover, to address the issue of background features present in patches, we propose a feature importance module that effectively distinguishes between foreground and background features, thus minimizing the impact of the background features. Extensive experiments were conducted on the widely used KITTI and nuScenes 3D object detection benchmarks. Notably, our VoxelNextFusion achieved around +3.20% in AP@0.7 improvement for car detection in hard level compared to the Voxel R-CNN baseline on the KITTI test dataset
There is a growing demand for customized and expressive 3D characters with the emergence of AI agents and Metaverse, but creating 3D characters using traditional computer graphics tools is a complex and time-consuming task. To address these challenges, we propose a user-friendly framework named Make-A-Character (Mach) to create lifelike 3D avatars from text descriptions. The framework leverages the power of large language and vision models for textual intention understanding and intermediate image generation, followed by a series of human-oriented visual perception and 3D generation modules. Our system offers an intuitive approach for users to craft controllable, realistic, fully-realized 3D characters that meet their expectations within 2 minutes, while also enabling easy integration with existing CG pipeline for dynamic expressiveness. For more information, please visit the project page at https://human3daigc.github.io/MACH/.
Causal inference from longitudinal observational data is a challenging problem due to the difficulty in correctly identifying the time-dependent confounders, especially in the presence of latent time-dependent confounders. Instrumental variable (IV) is a powerful tool for addressing the latent confounders issue, but the traditional IV technique cannot deal with latent time-dependent confounders in longitudinal studies. In this work, we propose a novel Time-dependent Instrumental Factor Model (TIFM) for time-varying causal effect estimation from data with latent time-dependent confounders. At each time-step, the proposed TIFM method employs the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architecture to infer latent IV, and then uses the inferred latent IV factor for addressing the confounding bias caused by the latent time-dependent confounders. We provide a theoretical analysis for the proposed TIFM method regarding causal effect estimation in longitudinal data. Extensive evaluation with synthetic datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of TIFM in addressing causal effect estimation over time. We further apply TIFM to a climate dataset to showcase the potential of the proposed method in tackling real-world problems.